An odd stereotype from H. G. Wells: Orientals live fast, die young

The H. G. Wells story "The New Accelerator" is about a drug that allows the person who takes it to think and move thousands of times faster than usual, making it subjectively appear that the world around him has slowed almost to a stop. Wells's description of the experience is quite cinematic and brings to mind this scene from one of the X-Men movies:

The X-Man who has this ability is called Quicksilver -- another name for the element mercury (Hg). And no, it didn't escape my notice that Wells also went by H. G.

This passage from "The New Accelerator" caught my attention because of its strangeness. One expects racial stereotypes from writers of Wells's era, but one also expects them to be basically accurate.

Suppose a man repeatedly dosed with such a preparation: he would live an active and record life indeed, but he would be an adult at eleven, middle-aged at twenty-five, and by thirty well on the road to senile decay. It seemed to me that so far Gibberne was only going to do for any one who took his drug exactly what Nature has done for the Jews and Orientals, who are men in their teens and aged by fifty, and quicker in thought and act than we [Europeans] are all the time.

Isn't that weird? The song about living fast and dying young is called "I Wanna Be a Kennedy" -- not a Takahashi or a Silberstein.

I understand that "Oriental" covered pretty much everything from Istanbul to Tokyo, embracing a wide variety of racial groups, but at least as far as the East Asian races are concerned, Wells's characterization couldn't be further from the truth. The Chinese, Japanese, and Koreans very clearly mature and age more slowly than Europeans. College students look like they're in junior high school. Junior high school students look like little kids. Women keep their youthful looks well into their forties and even fifties. Puberty hits later than for Europeans, old people remain spry for longer, and life expectancies are the highest in the world. Jews are also overrepresented among centenarians and certainly do not age faster than Europeans.

Indians do apparently age more quickly than Europeans (as do blacks), and they are perhaps the "Oriental" group with which Wells would have been most familiar, but are they "quicker in thought"? If IQ is taken as a reasonable proxy for such quickness, the races that outdo Europeans in that regard are the longer-lived, slower-aging Jews and East Asians, not South Asians.

Sync: Don't be confused. Back up the heavy burds.

I went out randonauting this morning with "yellow pterodactyl" as my target. I found this:

I know that's not the clearest shot -- one has to be discreet when snapping photos of random strangers -- but it reads, "Don't be confused. Back up the heavy burds."

(This shirt saying "Don’t be confused" is kind of like when angels show up in the Bible and say "Fear not" -- it’s a nice thought, but just saying it doesn’t actually help very much!)

I thought "heavy burds" could be interpreted as a pterodactyl reference. Like the word burd, a pterodactyl looks similar to a bird but isn't one, and one of the most salient differences is that most people's stereotypical "pterodactyl" is much larger and heavier than any bird.

As for myself, my mental image of "pterodactyl" has always been centered on the smaller genera (Pterodactylus, Rhamphorhynchus, Dimorphodon) -- possibly because the paleontologically correct books I read never used pterodactyl in the colloquial sense, and so I connected it exclusively with the genus Pterodactylus. I vividly remember encountering this 1980 Garfield strip as a child and being confused by it.

Everyone thinks of pterodactyls as basically being "dinosaurs" and therefore huge, but I never did. And I certainly never would have thought of a pterosaur -- basically a huge flying mouth -- as having particularly large legs. Because it introduced me to this novel concept of pterodactyls having big fat legs, this Garfield strip was burned into my memory, and I remember later thinking of one of my elementary school classmates (a rather "heavy burd" who always wore short skirts) as having "pterodactyl legs."

"Heavy burds" also made me think of the Sesame Street character Big Bird -- who of course is yellow and also looks a bit pterodactylish, especially as conceptualized in Jim Henson's original 1969 design sketch:

"Heavy burds" -- the heaviest bird ever to fly is believed to have been Argentavis magnificens, an extinct relative of the condors; the genus name refers to Argentina, where it was found, but literally means "silver bird." What species is Big Bird? In a 1981 cameo on Mister Rogers' Neighborhood, he claimed to be a "golden condor." Both silver and gold are classified as heavy metals. While the condors are considered "New World vultures" today, they ranged much more widely in the past, so perhaps the bronze birds of Stymphalia, exterminated by Hercules, were members of the same family.

At other times, Big Bird has claimed to be a lark. Skylark = l'arc-en-ciel.

Before he he made it big as Big Bird, puppeteer Carrol Spinney performed on The Judy and Goggle Show, manning the puppet Goggle opposite Judy Valentine. "Jimmy Goggles the God" and St. Valentine's Day have both been in the sync-stream recently.

Before we leave the subject of Sesame Street birds and pterodactyls, here's "Eggs Are Oval":

As Alistair Cookie would put it, "That surprise ending get me every time, blow me away!"

What about the "back up" part? Well, back up can mean "make a spare copy" or "move backwards," both of which fit what happens to the "heavy burds" in Green Lantern #30. Alien pterodactyls, seeing that their brethren on Earth have gone extinct, recreate the race by bringing a few pterodactyls back from the past -- similar to restoring from a backup copy. Then Green Lantern defeats the pteros by taking them back in time -- "backing up" to the Mesozoic.

Sync: Near the day of purification, there will be cobwebs spun back and forth in the sky

Last night I watched the latest video from LXXXVIII finis temporis, about the 1968 movie What's So Bad About Feeling Good and how it foreshadowed the birdemic. There are some pretty striking links there, and I highly recommend the video:

In the movie, the mayor of New York considers force-pecking all the citizens but thinks the people won't go for it, so they instead decide to treat everyone secretly by mixing an inhalable cure into all the gasoline, diesel, and jet fuel and releasing it into the atmosphere as air pollution.

Near the end, there's a shot of an airliner with clouds of exhaust coming out of it, with the implication that this is one of the ways the cure is being spread. This led one commenter to write "They put 'The Cure' in the chemtrails."

The commenter's handle is Batman. See my last post, "Are you not entertained?"

⁂

This morning, I started reading the H. G. Wells story "The Valley of Spiders," which I haven't finished yet. So far, we have three hombres riding through a valley when they see this:

And then he saw first one and then a second great white ball, a great shining white ball like a gigantic head of thistledown, that drove before the wind athwart the path. These balls soared high in the air, and dropped and rose again and caught for a moment, and hurried on and passed, but at the sight of them the restlessness of the horses increased.

Then presently he saw that more of these drifting globes -- and then soon very many more -- were hurrying towards him down the valley.

They became aware of a squealing. Athwart the path a huge boar rushed, turning his head but for one instant to glance at them, and then hurling on down the valley again. And at that all three stopped and sat in their saddles, staring into the thickening haze that was coming upon them.

"If it were not for this thistle-down --" began the leader.

But now a big globe came drifting past within a score of yards of them. It was really not an even sphere at all, but a vast, soft, ragged, filmy thing, a sheet gathered by the corners, an aerial jelly-fish, as it were, but rolling over and over as it advanced, and trailing long cobwebby threads and streamers that floated in its wake.

"It isn't thistle-down," said the little man.

Going from the title of the story, I'm going to assume that these objects have "long cobwebby threads" because they are cobwebs -- cobwebs flying through the air.

⁂

This evening, I glanced at /x/, and one of the threads caught my attention because it had a picture of the Maid of Orléans and said "Say something nice about Joan of Arc, /x/." I clicked in spite of myself. The first few comments were about the level I was expecting -- "she cute" -- "most based woman ever" -- so I was going to close the tab, but then this caught my eye:

Why was this posted in a thread about Joan of Arc? I don't know, probably the same reason Gay Pride Batman saying "Are you not entertained?" was posted in a thread about Yahweh. However it got there, it's a reference to chemtrails as cobwebs in the sky.

The LXXXVIII finis temporis video focuses mainly on the birdemic, but it also points out several 9/11 references in What's So Bad About Feeling Good. September 11, 2001, was just two weeks before Yom Kippur, making it "near the day of purification."

I wrote this in a comment on my own "Are you not entertained?" post -- the one featuring Gay Pride Batman:

Russell Crowe is etymologically “red crow,” not too conceptually dissimilar to a rainbow bat. Ted Hughes called the crow “a black rainbow.” Crowe has played Noah, a link to the dark arc/ark.

"A link to the dark arc/ark" is obviously also a link to Jeanne d'Arc. Joan was also the creator of the first rainbow flag.

Are you not entertained?

Checked The Secret Sun. The most recent meme post, "Life Ain't All Peaches and Meme," leads off with this image:

Then I checked /x/. One of the thumbnails caught my eye because it was a YouTube video I had watched recently (March 8), "Who is Yahweh - How a Warrior-Storm God became the God of the Israelites and World Monotheism." Nothing new for those familiar with the current scholarly consensus on such things. YouTube randomly recommended it, and I watched it because I currently have a post on the back burner about my own thoughts on the "Who is Yahweh?" question, and I also have an email correspondent who keeps sending me his own developing thoughts on the same question. The thread was titled "What do we do with the fact that YHWH was originally a warrior-storm god?" but, 4chan being 4chan, one of the early replies in the thread was this image:

These are of course references to a Russell Crowe movie that came out 23 years ago. Not exactly topical stuff.

The expression "ain't all peaches and cream," synchronistically juxtaposed with questions about the identity of a Being worshiped as God, reminds me of the H. G. Wells story I recently read, "Jimmy Goggles the God." The main character, telling the story of how some primitive tribesmen mistook him for a god (because he was wearing a diving costume, the titular "Jimmy Goggles"), says, "It ain't all jam being a god" -- presumably meaning something similar to "it ain't all peaches and cream."

Should sync posts be relegated to a separate blog?

Synchronicity posts have dominated this blog for the past few months. In the past, when that has happened with other "niche" topics -- ambigrams, dream precognition, Tarot, the Fourth Gospel, Whitley Strieber -- I've spun them off into separate dedicated blogs, most of which are now only sporadically active, as these various interests ebb and flow. I'm considering doing the same thing for sync but want to solicit reader feedback before making the decision.

Things I'm taking into consideration:

• I think I do have some readers who are mostly here for the syncs, and others who aren't interested in them at all. This was also true when I was doing ambigrams but really hasn't been for most of the other specialized topics; the readers of The Magician's Table and Fourth Gospel First seem to just be a subset of my readers here.
• Post titles rarely make it obvious whether it's a sync-post or a content-post, which probably leads to a few annoying bait-and-switch type experiences for readers.
• I suspect the Christian-oriented aggregators that feature this blog (New World Island and Synlogos) would like to be able to aggregate content posts only, without zillions of sync notes cluttering up their front pages.
• Tags work differently for sync and non-sync posts, so it would be nice to have two separate systems. It's not helpful when a given tag serves up a mixed multitude of posts about that topic and posts that just feature it as a sync theme.

On the other hand:

• Having everything on one blog is convenient for readers who want to follow it all.
• I've tries dedicated sync blogs twice before, but they both fizzled out. Of course, the volume and frequency of syncs in those days was a few orders of magnitude lower than what I experience nowadays.
• The whole point of sync is that everything is connected, so compartmentalizing it would be weird.

Readers, if you have anything to say about this one way or the other, speak now or forever hold your peace.

The candles blew and then disappeared

In "Knock, knock, Neo" (February 27), I mention reading the H. G. Wells story "The Red Room." The narrator, scoffing at ghosts, attempts to stay in the titular room, which is supposed to be haunted, but ends up getting spooked in spite of himself. He lights lots of candles, but they keep going out, one after another, faster than he can relight them, and in the end he panics. After his ordeal, he tells his hosts that the room is haunted by Fear itself:

"You believe now," said the old man with the withered hand, "that the room is haunted?" He spoke no longer as one who greets an intruder, but as one who condoles with a friend.

"Yes," said I, "the room is haunted. . . . There is neither ghost of earl nor ghost of countess in that room; there is no ghost there at all, but worse, far worse, something impalpable --”

"Well?" they said.

"The worst of all the things that haunt poor mortal men," said I; "and that is, in all its nakedness -- 'Fear!' Fear that will not have light nor sound, that will not bear with reason, that deafens and darkens and overwhelms. It followed me through the corridor, it fought against me in the room --"

I stopped abruptly. There was an interval of silence. My hand went up to my bandages. "The candles went out one after another, and I fled --"

Three or four days ago, about a week after reading "The Red Room," I was praying in my chapel at night, with several candles as my only illumination. At one point, although the door and windows were closed, the candle flames all suddenly turned horizontal and then went out one by one. No panic ensued, in part because, unlike Wells's protagonist, I had the option of just flipping on the light switch.

In a comment on my own March 10 post "Weirdly specific sync: Meerkats and piranhas," I mentioned listening to the Keep Shelly in Athens version of the Blue Öyster Cult song "(Don't Fear) the Reaper," noting the "Valentine" reference in the lyrics. Debbie replied that she didn't know the song but had looked up the lyrics and was struck by a different line: "Then the door was open, and the wind appeared." I hadn't noticed that line myself because that verse isn't included in the KSiA version. I looked up the original:

Then the door was open and the wind appeared
The candles blew and then disappeared
The curtains flew and then he appeared
Saying don't be afraid . . .

Still knocking

I ran across this while exploring a random street in a small town. It would have been quite a coincidence even in America, to say nothing of a country where only 4% of the population professes any form of Christianity.

This is a print of Christ at Heart's Door by Warner Sallman, an evangelical Protestant artist. The heart shape formed by the lighting and the door frame is a deliberate element of the composition.